He had turned to her then, his eyes stony, his voice wrapped in ice.

Do you know the worst thing? Zoe was bearing that pain—she was strong—but you were weak. You were too weak to bear the pain with her. What kind of mother does that make you? What kind of mother can’t look after their own child when they need them most? I’ll never forgive you for what you’ve done. And I’ll never forgive myself for having failed to stop you.

Just over twelve weeks later, when Audrey had run past the parked police cars and into the sitting room to find Jess hysterical and to be told what Edward had done, she had known immediately that she was to blame.

So many times during the intervening years she had spent sleepless nights thinking about how different their lives might have been had she never told Edward the truth, wondering whether he might still be alive, whether they might still be married, happy even. Whenever she had seen a newspaper report or watched a documentary about a child surviving cancer against the odds, she had heard Edward’s allegations resounding in her ears until she had understood that there needed to be only the thinnest sliver of doubt between conviction and uncertainty for the guilt to slip in and consume you every single day of your life.

Sitting now on a bench in Central Park between her daughters, Audrey thought back to that morning in Zoe’s room, administering those doses of morphine in an attempt to alleviate her daughter’s suffering. She remembered how she had sensed a change in the air, a tiny disturbance of light, but had been too preoccupied to turn around and investigate. She thought about Jess’s accusation and her hatred of Lily all these years, Jess’s words hammering in her ears: I saw you coming out of her room. I saw the expression on your face. You were white as a sheet. You barricaded yourself against the door, and I knew—I just knew—something terrible had happened.

And all at once Audrey understood that decades of unspoken stories were like strata of ancient rock: layer upon layer of family secrets impacting on one another until the truth was hidden so far beneath the surface that only the most committed could excavate it.

Audrey looked from left to right, from Lily to Jess.

“Lily didn’t kill Zoe, Jess. It was me. I was the one who helped Zoe to die.”

She turned to Lily and held her gaze even as she longed to look away. “But you already knew that, didn’t you, Lily?”

Chapter 59

Lily

Lily felt the heat of her mum’s understanding, felt a history she had long since buried begin to resurface.

For years she had speculated as to the cause of Jess’s hostility but never once had she imagined that Jess had got the facts so very nearly right but all the key players wrong. All this time she had imagined that it was their dad’s death Jess blamed her for, even though she had never been able to pinpoint why. Only now did Lily understand that Jess had plugged the gap in her knowledge with her own version of the truth. Because sometimes, Lily knew only too well, the only way to make sense of the incomprehensible was to tell yourself a story.